Kiss
by madamenaan
Summary: A little bit of a scene from 3.23 "Father of the Bride".


Disclaimer: I don't own _Las Vegas_.

Author's Note: Just a little oneshot – I'm not really sure where it came from! Hope you like it :)

* * *

**Kiss**

* * *

She doesn't know why she's doing this.

In her head, she rationalizes that it's just nerves. Tomorrow is her wedding day and it's all happening so fast, and she just has cold feet: that's all.

But, even as she thinks it, she knows that this explanation isn't really enough; she knows that, cold feet or not, she shouldn't be standing here in her wedding dress and looking this way at a man who isn't her fiancé.

And yet she is.

"Derek is a lucky guy," Danny says. His voice is soft. That voice.

He smiles, and the smile doesn't quite fit the expression on the rest of his face, although he tries to make it.

"Thank you," she answers. She smiles back at him.

They are just sad, she thinks: she is leaving, after all. She is leaving, and it might be a long, long time before she can come back.

And Danny is her friend – perhaps, somehow and strangely enough, since Nessa left, her closest friend. A funny kind of friend, maybe, but they have a good time together. He is easy to talk to and he makes her laugh.

It makes sense that they will miss each other. That is all this is. She will miss him.

She would like to do something to show him that. That he means a lot to her, matters a lot to her. She could give him a kiss goodbye, she thinks. A chaste, friend-like, kiss-on-the-cheek goodbye.

She leans up to him, and she means to kiss his cheek, she does. But at the last moment, before she can even think it through, she changes her mind, and her mouth hits the corner of his instead.

She kisses him quickly, lightly, and he leans down toward her just a little bit. She can feel him kiss her back.

And it feels -

She steps away. Though, for a fraction of a second, she doesn't want to. A muscle twitches minutely in his jaw, the only sign that maybe he doesn't want her to either.

She knows that wasn't an innocent kiss. But she tries to tell herself it was anyway.

The room is quiet. The silence is alive, electrical, a throbbing pulse inside her ear.

She knows she should move away, should say something light and then laugh and the silence will break.

And yet she doesn't.

Later, she will try to put this moment out of her mind. She will try to think about Derek, who she is marrying tomorrow night. She will think about his proposal, about how romantic it was, to kiss him to the sound of harpsichord music, head spinning.

The dizzy thrill of that will seem a little empty, somehow, next to this one small kiss from Danny.

She will tell herself that Danny doesn't do romance like that. He doesn't do grand emotions, or sweeping gestures. She will try to silence the voice in her head that tells her that, really, that doesn't matter. That she has never really done romance either.

She will tell herself that Derek is perfect, without faults. And he is a doctor – he heals the sick, saves lives for a living.

Danny, she will tell herself, is no saint, and never pretended to be.

Though the truth of it, in the end, is that Danny doesn't have to be perfect, and he doesn't have to work for Doctors Without Borders, for her to know that he is as good and generous and gentle as they come.

The truth of it is that right now, right at this moment, with him there and looking at her like that, she should be shaking her head and stepping away, and she isn't.

He looks at her. It's only seconds, but it feels like the longest of times.

She looks back. For a moment, she hesitates.

This is wrong, she knows. Wrong and crazy and self-destructive and probably unfair to all three of them at once.

And yet she does it anyway. She knows she's going to and so does he.

She steps into his kiss.

One day, someone will tell her that every person has a moment, one that splits the world on its axis and divides everything up, for better or for worse, into what came before and what came after. This is that moment for her.

It feels almost unreal. A daydream, nothing more. But she knows it's not.

She keeps on kissing him. The kiss is soft at first, and then more urgent. She feels his hands come up to cup her face.

She doesn't know what she's doing.

And yet she does.


End file.
